There are enough demons in Water by the Spoonful to fill the realms of Pluto. In Quiara Alegria Hudes’s 2012 Pulitzer Prize-winning drama, now running at the Taper, just about everyone in the seven-person cast is battling a severe psychological problem, beginning with the more-or-less main character Elliot (Sean Carvajal), an Iraq war vet with PTSD and a gimpy leg. Then there are Fountainhead, Chutes & Ladders, and Orangutan (Josh Braaten, Bernard K. Addison, and Sylvia Kwan), three crack addicts communicating pseudonymously in an online chat room (moderated by Haikumom aka Odessa (Luna Lauren Velez, a recovering crackhead herself). Then there’s Yazmin (Keren Lugo), a music professor who has just been dumped by her husband but overcomes that pain by looking after the angry, blasted Elliot. Yazmin also talks about the jazz musician John Coltrane, who “democratized the notes” and allowed ugliness “to become an end in itself.” The play follows that theory of dissonance and eclecticism: the story jumps from place to place (Philadelphia, San Diego, Japan, and Puerto Rico), though the time, 2009, remains the same. As in Elliot, A Soldier’s Fugue, the first play in Hudes’ trilogy (now running at the Kirk Douglas), the actors also deliver speeches in a free-jazz way, riffing, soloing, then coming together to resolve a scene semi-harmoniously. Coltrane would approve, the audience maybe not. Working on a wide-open, high-ceilinged set with upstage insets to suggest the various locations above, the actors face the usual Taper audibility problem. Some, like Addison, Braaten, and Kwan, manage to be heard by belting their lines out; others, like Carvajal, are unable to communicate much of the time. That’s a pity, because Hudes writes poetic and pungent dialogue, and has much to say about the human condition, the struggle people must go through to overcome hang-ups and connect with each other in a tough, perilous world.
